An Oregon man cheated death Wednesday night by the slimmest of margins.

Tom Comstock, of Portland, was rear-ended by a truck last week, causing a load of lumber to shoot through his back windshield and almost kill him. The lumber scraped the side of his head and came to rest on his steering wheel.

Mr Comstock, a registered nurse, then immediately jumped out of his vehicle to make sure no one else was injured in the multi-car pileup.

The luckiest man alive: Tom Comstock suffered only minor scrapes to his head

‘I get stopped, and look at the lumber in my front seat and say to myself ‘damn. That should have killed me,’ he wrote on his Facebook page.

‘Then I do what any good nurse would do. I jump out of my car and yell ‘IS ANYONE HURT? I’M A NURSE!’

Paramedics arrived as Mr Comstock tended to the other vehicles and were amazed he was okay.

‘The paramedic asks me to step back cause ‘this is gonna be gruesome,’ he continued. ‘I don't think they believed me when I told them it was my car.’

Shiver me timbers: Not even Mr Comstock himself can believe he survived so narrowly

Incredible: The lumber shot just past his head and hand, shocking paramedics who expected a gruesome scene

Amazed he still has a hand: Mr Comstock says he moved his hand just before the lumber plowed through his vehicle, or else he would have lost it

One of the paramedics told him she expected much worse, he further explained.

Pictures taken by the lucky man show what looks like an impossibly lu cky escape from death, it doesn’t look like anyone could possibly have walked away from the vehicle alive.

He was taken to a hospital after a brief on-scene examination.

As word of how Mr Comstock made it to the hospital spread, he began to receive visitors looking to catch lightning in a bottle.

A miracle: This incident looks unsurvivable from the front of the truck

How could anyone survive this: The lumber took out the head rest on the driver's seat

What a wreck: In addition to lumber almost taking his life, the rear end of Mr Comstock's truck is also smashed up

‘Most of the people there wanted to rub my head for luck,’ he wrote. ‘Couldn't count the number of people who told me to buy a lottery ticket.’

A doctor told him he would be fine, to just take pain killers and buy that lottery ticket.